About The Optimal Retirement
Planner

The Optimal Retirement Planner (ORP)
was originally built to demonstrate the feasibility of implementing
a computationally intensive process on an Internet web site that is directed
at the retail market. ORP is built using tools and techniques developed
in the field of Operations Research over the last 60 years.

Table 1: ORP Web Site Architecture

The core of ORP is an industrial strength linear programming optimizer (BOSC)
originally built by William Orchard_Hays and used mostly in feed blending applications.
The optimizer is surrounded by a model management system (MathPro), and it's relational database,
that describes the
model, builds the LP matrix and processes the solution results.
MathPro is used mostly for petro chemical refinery simulations. The outer
layer is a Perl implemented Common Gateway Interface (CGI) Script that communicates
with the browser based client. This simple, straightforward, elegant architecture
has remained in place since 1996 surviving many changes to application side
of the model.

James S. Welch, Jr (Resume)
is the principle architect, formulator and implementer of ORP. Significant contributions
were also made by: